Blog

By Luci Hagen

Finding triumphs through tribulations in the past school year:

When I began this project, I found it nearly impossible to try and describe in 650 words how drastically COVID has affected every part of my life. I hope that by focusing on the unique positives these unprecedented circumstances have presented for young folks like me, rather than the obvious negatives, I can help the community understand our perspective just a little bit more.

At the beginning of quarantine and as distance learning first began, I was already struggling to keep up in school. I was at a loss for motivation to do anything, and any semblance of order in my life was out the window. The only constant in my schedule was that every night in the first few months, starting at 11 pm until around two or three am, I would practice writing on my computer. At first, I’d journal my day, or write poetic rants, but gradually I decided to concentrate my work on something bigger. I discovered an 8th-grade screenplay project on my old computer. I noticed the writing, plot, and characters were all unclear and poorly written. So I took it upon myself to reconfigure the screenplay into a short novel worth reading. Night by night I furiously typed until my fingers grew tired from keeping up with the words that flew through my mind. Eventually, when the first month passed since restarting my story, I’d managed to write around fifty pages of work, more than I’d ever been able to accomplish sequentially in my life.

I kept tweaking my story, but slowly realized I’d never be satisfied with it until I could be taught by an experienced educator on how to make my writing better. This prompted me to take an English class at the junior college over the summer, for I knew I’d have plenty of time as all my other summer plans were canceled because of the pandemic. Thankfully, I was able to excel in that class. Upon returning to online school in the fall, I found it yet again an arduous task to stay on top of my work for all except two classes, those being English and Journalism.

By this point, I knew writing would be the only thing I’d be motivated to do in school, so I took that knowledge and ran with it. I became invested in the project of our school newspaper, The Hounds Bark, and wanted our articles to reach as many people as possible. So I contacted the local newspaper, The Healdsburg Tribune, in hopes of a partnership to increase the number of readers our paper was receiving. Through this interaction, I was offered an internship at their paper. Since then I’ve been writing articles for them with my friend, Elise Thompson, one of which landed the cover of the January 14th issue. If I hadn’t had the time to take up creative writing on my own during those first few months of quarantine, I might’ve never taken my passion for English as far as I have now.

So I think what not many people have spoken about is that through this abundance of time and need for self-motivation and responsibility, students have been able to find out what they can easily get excited to do and what they cannot. For some people that is music, exercise, photography, gardening, reading, really anything that they full-heartedly enjoy. We have had so much time to self-reflect and discover our true strengths and weaknesses as people, an opportunity that hardly any other generation has been able to receive. With this newfound understanding of ourselves, we’ve been able to try and find ways to improve ourselves. And better yet, we realize what really matters to us, and have developed a greater appreciation for life’s little joys as well as things we never knew we’d have to live without.

Published in the March 2, 2021 issue of the Sonoma County Gazette, “Finding triumphs through tribulations in the past school year.”

Luci Hagen is a 10th grade student at Healdsburg High School in Healdsburg, California, where she lives with her parents, her younger siblings Lola and Cayson, her scrappy mutt named Nigel, and her orange tabby named Leia. Though she appreciates her studies and has a deep passion for writing that she hopes will lead her someplace significant, Luci also loves to create art, listen to music, act in musicals, and has currently been trying to learn guitar and how to play golf. Above all, she enjoys spending time with her family and has made it a personal goal to fill her high school years with as many bizarre and exciting experiences with her friends as possible.

By Ken Delpit

“Just write.”

It sounds so simple. It seems so wrong, and yet is so right. Planning and preconception have their places, certainly. But it really is OK, and better, to just write. Leave behind the pressures, the impediments, the anxieties. Put aside your doubts, your fears, your insecurities. Just write.

Let it go. Let it flow. Write without knowing what comes next. Let yourself be surprised by yourself. Don’t peek beyond the current thought. Deal with the moments in front of you, around you, within you. Don’t make it happen. Let it happen.

Just write. It sounds so easy. And it can be. When the shackles are discarded, one’s pace can go from stumbling to walking, and from walking to running. The bottleneck can move from its usual place, the mind, to the fingers, which are suddenly unable to keep up.

But “Just write” as a guiding convention is fraught with detours and traps, many of them inconvenient, some of them debilitating. For one, the proper amount and degree of thinking spent during writing is an elusive and changing target.

Bolting forward with absolutely no forethought is good for loosening writing muscles, both physical and mental. Proceeding freely can lead to discovery within, and of, oneself. Arriving at thoughts that one did not realize one had can be unnerving or frightening. But it can also be exhilarating and joyous.

Often, however, a little bit of imagining and conceiving can transform your writing from warmup activity to something with potential to be more than exercise. And therein lies the dilemma. When to plunge ahead. When to pause and think.

Just write. Or, just write, think for a bit now and then, and then just write some more. It’s a tricky balance. Tend too much toward the pensive, and one is right back where one started, at the writer’s-block starting blocks. Cast away too much thought, and one flirts with gibberish.

For myself, I find that pauses are most useful when they do not occur up front. Let it go, to start. Find a stride. Hear a voice. Surprise yourself. See what lurks in your unknown. Then, when you discover something worthy of a lull, welcome the reflection. But don’t linger too long. It’s a fine balance, alright. Be alert for helpful interludes. But mostly, just write.

In his writing, Ken Delpit sometimes contends with voices. Finding “the” voice for a piece can render one immobile before starting. Even finding “a” voice among several can lead to cafeteria-buffet indecision: How to pick when they all could work? In times like these, Ken finds Marlene Cullen’s advice to “Just write” helpful. Then, it’s not a matter of finding just the right voice. More, it’s going with whatever voice you hear now.

By Deb Fenwick

It’s February 2021, and the red planet is on the screen.

News headline: We’re looking at Perseverance. The world watches as Perseverance plummets and parachutes onto the surface of Mars.

Back in July 2020, we Earthlings launched our perseverance high into space with all the ambition, engineering precision, and imagination we could stuff into a carrier rocket and an SUV-sized robot. NASA’s landing of the rover seven months later was flawless—a picture-perfect touchdown of six wheels hitting dusty rocks on the red-orange Mars-scape. 

According to reports, one aim of the mission is to search for ancient microbial life—biosignatures and astrobiology that will provide insights into early evolution and the universe’s future. The biggest questions about our ancient past and cosmic future, indeed the nature of life itself, are being explored up there by a Star Wars-like robotic traveler and its little mini-helicopter drone of a friend. And, in spite of our smartphones, we’re asking the same questions that every ancient sea navigator, stargazer, and shaman have pondered as they looked toward the heavens.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, perseverance has looked a little different over the past year. Here on our planet, there’s a virus that has indiscriminately spread its signature across every nation, with over half a million dead in the U.S. and only a nebulous prospect of herd immunity on the horizon. As quickly as scientists develop a vaccine, virulent new strains of the virus emerge. Perhaps we humans aren’t the only species that possesses great perseverance.

In the face of lockdowns and the loss of loved ones, how do we maintain equilibrium without a parachute, without plummeting?

Over the past year, I’ve noticed sounds that previously escaped my attention. They were always present, of course. When I listen now, however, I’m in awe of church bell chimes on the hour, the low rumble of freight trains carrying grain across the Midwest, and the symphony of early springtime songbirds with stories to tell. There’s a lot to hear in silence.

Sometimes, it’s so quiet that I hear my own heartbeat. And in these moments, I’m reminded of my heart’s perseverance. Its steady thump and rhythm are wonderfully outside of my control. Ultimately, I thank my lucky stars that I’m not in charge of keeping my heart beating. If it were my job, I’d become distracted when looking for my house keys. I’d forget to focus on keeping my old friend going in favor of scrolling through texts or answering an email.

I’m so grateful that there’s persistence, a perseverance at work that keeps hearts beating and the tides rolling in without any help from me. It gives me comfort that there’s an impulse, a force controlling the movement of planets around the sun. There’s a whisper that urges buds to blossom and embryos to grow. That gives me faith in things I can’t see or hear. It’s subtle, this quiet call to persevere. It’s an ancient echo, a biosignature that pulses electromagnetically from the past to the future. It came from our ancestors. It’s now in my heart and in yours. And it’s in every redwood branch stretching toward the sky and it’s on the ocean floor.  There it is on the surface of Mars. Here it is, in the palms of our hands.  It’s the ineffable answer to all the big questions. I choose to believe that it’s bigger than any virus. And that, above all else, helps me to persevere.  

Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, youth advocate, and public school administrator, she now finds herself with ample time to read books by her heroes and write every story that was patiently waiting to be told. When she’s not traveling with her heartthrob of a husband or dreaming up wildly impractical adventures with her intrepid, college-age daughter, you’ll find her out in the garden getting muddy with two little pups.

By Lynn Levy

Daria stood with her nose up against the glass, peeking in at the door. She didn’t go in—she knew better. And when someone came out, she melted away, back into the shadows, back where she couldn’t be seen.

But the tall blond man saw her anyway, and walked toward her. He was a giant, an enormous bulk of branches and limbs that looked like he shouldn’t be able to balance, let alone walk. She imagined him crashing over, like her string doll did when she pressed the button on the bottom. But instead, he folded himself down, quiet as a sheet, until he was squatting in front of her.

“Are you Daria?” he asked.

Daria furrowed her brow. The rule was, you don’t tell strangers your name. But another rule was that you don’t lie.

“Yes,” she finally decided upon, because she liked his pale blue eyes, and the fact that they were down right across from hers, and she didn’t want him to get up yet.

“What’s so interesting in there?” he asked, turning his head over his shoulder, back toward the door.

“Don’t know. Can’t go in,” Daria said.

The blue eyes flashed. “Ah,” he said. “So is it secrets you love, or puzzles?”

Daria thought about it a moment and said, “They’re the same.” Because they were. They were both things to figure out.

“Insightful,” the man said. Daria didn’t know the word, but understood that he agreed.

He made a quick movement and she felt a brush of air beside her ear, and then he was holding a coin, not an ordinary quarter or dime, but large and nearly white.

“Usually this is where I say, ‘Look what I found behind your ear,’ but it comes from farther than that.”

Daria’s eyes locked on the thing. It nearly glowed, and she imagined she felt heat coming from it.

“Do you want it?” he asked.

There were rules about taking candy from strangers (don’t), and following strangers (don’t), and getting into cars with strangers (don’t). Daria understood the common thread of these rules, but chose just then to be precise. There were no rules about fat, glowing white coins, none at all.

“Yes,” she said.

He reached out his hand, an invitation for hers, and right then Daria dared. She lay her hand, palm open and up on top of his, and felt his fingers against the back of her hand. They were warm.  She didn’t know what she’d expected, but he seemed like he could be something . . . else.

Gently, he pressed the coin into her hand, and closed her fingers around it. He patted her closed fist with his other hand.

He poured his pale blue eyes into her dark brown ones a second more, then unfolded, standing up like the stop action movie she’d seen on TV of a tree growing.

“Karl, you coming?” someone yelled from behind the door. He turned, neatly blocking her from view and said, in a much gruffer voice, “Can’t a man take a leak?”

There was a grumble and the door shut again, the little bell tinkling in a way that was too pretty.

Karl strode toward the door, and just as he went in, looked back over his shoulder at her. He nodded, just barely, and went inside.

You cannot beat a bully, was one of the things Daria had worked out on her own. And basically, all grownups were bullies. You could only outsmart them—and so Daria knew how to hide things. Real things, like the coin, and unreal things, like what she was thinking.

One of the rules was that she wasn’t supposed to spy on Uncle Brad’s friends. But this uncle would pass, like the others.

She melted clean away, into her best hiding place, and didn’t open her hand until she got there. The coin was gone. But from her palm shone a clean white light that filled the space. What it was, was the beginning.

Lynn Levy’s writing has been published in The Write Spot: Discoveries and The Write Spot: Possibilities, both available on Amazon in print ($15) and as an ereader ($2.99).

Lynn lives in Northern California with her husband, an endless parade of wild birds, and one dour skunk who passes by nightly. She and the skunk have an understanding.

Lynn has been an audio engineer, software developer, survived middle management, and is wildly enjoying her latest reinvention as a technical writer.